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Star Challenge

A nice programming finger exercise for in between

The mission of last year's "Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge" was to write a program that prints a star on the screen that is made up of individual *-characters. Here is a possible solution in Commodore C64 Basic, neither optimized for size nor speed, but rather for readability.

10 PRINT "{clear}"
20 FOR Y=-8 TO 9
30 FOR X=-8 TO 9
40 IF ABS(X)>4 AND ABS(Y)>4 THEN PRINT " "; : GOTO 80
50 IF ABS(Y)-ABS(X)>4 OR ABS(X)-ABS(Y)>4 THEN PRINT " "; : GOTO 80
60 PRINT"*";
80 NEXT X
90 PRINT
100 NEXT Y

On my GitHub page you can find more solutions, e.g. as assembler or as a C implementation.

My GitHub repository for the Star Challenge

Star Challenge website

As we all know, Christmas is coming soon, so it will be interesting to see what the challenge will be this year.